The Marriage Circle

1924. USA. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Screenplay by Paul Bern, based on the Lothar Schmidt (Goldschmidt) play Only a Dream. With Florence Vidor, Adolphe Menjou, Monte Blue, Marie Prevost. A Viennese comedy of sexual manners inspired by Charles Chaplin’s A Woman in Paris (1923), The Marriage Circle is one of Ernst Lubitsch’s most cherished films, said by biographer Herman Weinberg to be a favorite of Preston Sturges, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, and even Lubitsch himself, who remade it eight years later as the 1932 musical One Hour with You, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald. The Berlin-born filmmaker made The Marriage Circle, his second Hollywood feature, for the fledgling Warner Bros. studio, bringing a sophisticated and insouciant Continental wit to American cinema. In this story of the sexual misadventures of two married couples, one blissful (Vidor and Blue) and the other sour (Prevost and Menjou), Lubitsch hones his mastery of the simple but revealing detail, and gestures and décor unencumbered by fussy excess—that legendary gossamer touch perfected in films like Lady Windermere’s Fan, Trouble in Paradise, The Smiling Lieutenant, The Shop around the Corner, and Ninotchka. Lubitsch’s Vienna is a forbidden paradise, a dream “as light as moondust, [shedding] a radiance of capricious moods and shadings,” as one contemporary critic rapturously wrote. Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with funds from The Film Foundation. Silent with piano accompaniment. 103 min.

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